The inventive concept relates generally to electronic storage devices, and more particularly, to solid state disk devices and related methods of storing and reading data.
The demand for electronic storage media continues to grow each year, especially in light of the increasing adoption of personal computing and communication devices. To address this increasing demand, researchers have developed numerous types of data storage devices, each providing advantages and/or drawbacks compared with the others.
Hard disk drives (HDDs), for instance, tend to have relatively high storage density, high data transmission speed, fast data access time, and low cost. But they also tend to suffer from mechanical defects and high power consumption on account of their numerous moving parts.
Due to these and other shortcomings of HDDs, there is an ongoing trend to replace HDDs with solid state disk devices (SSDs) incorporating nonvolatile memories such as flash memories. These SSDs generally have fewer moving parts than HDDs, and therefore they tend to have fewer mechanical defects and lower power consumption. In addition, the reduction of moving parts can reduce latency and mechanical drive time compared with HDDs, allowing SSDs in some instances to execute read and write operations more quickly than HDDs. Moreover, SSDs can also reduce errors caused by latency and mechanical friction, improving reliability of read and write operations. Finally, SSDs tend to produce less heat and noise than HDDs and are largely resistant to external impacts, making them attractive for portable devices.